@Glen....Gudoldaze and Round Tuits....now you've got me reminiscing. I built a colour organ from a Practical Electronics article. It had 3 9V-240V transformers with the 9V windings across the speaker outputs and the 240V windings driving SCRs which drove the lights. One 240V winding had a cap across it, and one a cap in series to do the frequency selection. It had a 20R pot in series with the speaker connection as an intensity control. Hideously crude, but it worked. I hate to think what it did to the speaker impedance presented to the amp.....and I think it needed a couple of watts to drive it. I had it in my junk store, meaning to redesign it, for years but got rid of it when I left ZImbabwe. Probably just as well, I certainly don't have time now....

Never had a color organ, instead used a defunct small TV (with CRT still working) with an additional yoke (deflection coil assembly) driven from a pair of 6L6 in pushpull, the vertical winding through a few tens of uF for bass phase shift. The resulting Lissajous figures, when projected onto a wall through a 4" magnifying glass, were truly mesmerizing. The harmonics of Black Sabbath created some really interesting Lissajous figures with curls in the corners of rectangles; my buddies would sit transfixed for hours staring at the pulsating patterns projected onto the wall. Always wanted to do the same thing with a color TV, but never got a round tuit.

In conjunction with unveiling of EE Times’ Silicon 60 list, journalist & Silicon 60 researcher Peter Clarke hosts a conversation on startups in the electronics industry. One of Silicon Valley's great contributions to the world has been the demonstration of how the application of entrepreneurship and venture capital to electronics and semiconductor hardware can create wealth with developments in semiconductors, displays, design automation, MEMS and across the breadth of hardware developments. But in recent years concerns have been raised that traditional venture capital has turned its back on hardware-related startups in favor of software and Internet applications and services. Panelists from incubators join Peter Clarke in debate.